ACT-IAC BreakfastDevOps DeliveryAdrian WebbJay Huie

DevOps Delivery

“A cross-functional community of practice dedicated to the study of

building, evolving, and operating rapidly changing, resilient systems at

scale.”Jez Humble - Author of “Lean Enterprise” and “Continuous

Delivery” and Deputy Director for Infrastructure at 18F

DevOps:

Common Values

Shared Vision

Training and Skills

Adaptive Techniques

Tools and Infrastructure

Cadence and Communication

Agency Specific

Organizational Fingerprint

Continual Improvement

DevOps Context

Principles Practices Products

First agree on core values, otherwise the will be no foundation to build upon.

Then establish shared culture, setting expectations for pace, presence, and practices.

Lastly evaluate technologies and tools, this diminishes the risk of tool-driven tyranny.

1 2 3

Systems Thinking

Emphasizes the performance of the entire system, as opposed to the performance of a specific silo of work or department

Amplify feedback loops

The goal of almost any process improvement initiative is to shorten and amplify feedback loops so necessary corrections can be continually made

Culture of experimentation

Create a culture that fosters; continual experimentation, taking risks and learning from failure; and understanding that repetition and practice is the prerequisite to mastery

DevOps guiding principles (Three Ways)

Gene Kim - Author of “The Phoenix Project”

DevOps Prioritization

Policy

Process

Projects

People

Key DevOps characteristics (CALMS)Culture

The DevOps movement seeks to unify teams and create easy channels of communication and collaboration

Automation

Automation plays a critical role in DevOps because it allows us to streamline operations, more effectively document and deliver, and collaborate with others

Lean

The DevOps movement helps deliver value to the customer and to continuously improve the ability to deliver value by removing wasteMeasurement

The DevOps movement seeks continuous improvement through experimentation, measurement, learning, and adjustment in iterative cycles

Sharing

In order to create an efficient cross functional team, an organization must learn to trust their team members with information and decision making authority in their respective areas. Avoid being the blocker.

DevOps journey: FECStory

FEC needed to revamp their public digital experience to make federal campaign finance more transparent and accessible

FEC opted to focus on modern development practices, open source technology, and agile project management

Now they are embarking on a journey to scale those practices across the IT organization and build a culture of transparency and cross team collaboration

Characteristics

FEC is a small agency and the IT divisions are pretty close knit

FEC started their IT modernization efforts with their most mission focused applications with the most scrutiny, but got experienced help to guide them

Divisions seem to embrace change and see it as something that will ultimately benefit them

Senior management and the FEC commissioners believe and support the IT modernization efforts

The story of a little agency that could

DevOps journey: NRCStory

NRC needed to reduce the impact of the security and authorization activities.

NRC implemented an agile approach to developing a devops culture, focusing on integrating security expertise into product delivery activities

They have applied this method to two pilot projects and sunset their old security process to build an integrated IT delivery process for the entire organization, promoting a culture of collaboration

Characteristics

NRC is a small agency with a culture that has historically reflected the risk-adverse nature of their mission domain

NRC initiated a devops transformation by piloting the approach with a small and large project, utilizing organizations deep experience

Group perspectives initially reflected historic hazard but a shared dialogue helped promote positive change and began to be seen as something to ultimately benefit everyone

The CIO and senior management helped create the space and dialogue to support a devops movement

Re-regulating Risk

The future ofGovernment DevOps

DevOps builds a culture of collaboration and sharingTrust

Open communication strategies, knowledge sharing, and tactical autonomy will continue to work their way into agencies, assisting with cross team collaboration.

Standards

Teams from across agencies will start working more effectively together towards strategic and tactical goals, and more shared (vs. top-down driven) standards will emerge.

Marketplaces

IT departments will start to offer a greater quantity and variety of shared platforms and services. Centers of excellence will emerge.

Cross-functional

Organizational silos will start to be augmented or replaced with cross-functional teams, while critical silos will likely become shared services.

DevOps automates relentlessly

Efficiency

Automation will continue enhancing manual labor. Automation is less costly to maintain and often has better success at repetitive tasks than manual labor, allowing agencies to focus on increasingly mission-value activities.

Security

Compliance documentation, scanning, and general security processes will become more automated and continuous, allowing for more iterative, agile, and modular development and acquisition.

Software

Useful private sector and shared government software services will work their way into agencies at an accelerating rate.

Coordination

Application development and operations will get more seamless, as each work together to build infrastructure, testing, and deployment as code.

DevOps measures and iteratively improves

Knowledge

Through better data submission, storage, access, and analytics tools, agencies will be able to effectively follow indicators and projects, and analyze measurements over time in detail.

Evaluation

Agencies will get better at defining success criteria and major risk factors over time that can help drive the measurements monitored across the organizations.

Tracking

There will be better means to constantly track the states of programs and projects and better controls will be put in place to ensure success.

Iteration

Agencies will get better at executing measured iterative projects that evolve in an agile fashion according to ever changing business needs.

DevOps is perfect for lean organizations

Acquisitions

Agencies will get creative with acquisitions to support new services like the cloud, as well as smaller and more modular contracting. Much of the boilerplate will be automated.

Talent

More technical talent will be hired directly into government to provide better oversight and internal collaboration. These may be part of digital service teams that spin up.

Budgeting

Agencies will continue to have to live with budget cuts, and yearly cycles, to effectively accomplish their missions with less capital at their disposal.

Adaptation

More focus in hiring will be placed on finding folks who can learn and adapt than have static experience. The digital frontier changes fast.

Our goal is to get people working effectively together

● with open accessible communication,● effective and secure sharing, ● efficient tools and processes,● an inclusive welcoming culture,● and an eye for continuous assessment and

improvement.

DevOps is a philosophy to solve a people problem